Schultz looked unconvinced. He began cleaning his pebble glasses with a handkerchief he removed from his top pocket. ‘And then there’s a continual problem with the electricity. No sooner do I get the machinery to work than the supply is cut off, so at least twice a week we end up with no papers being printed at all.’
‘I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again,’ promised Armstrong, without any idea of how he would go about it. ‘What else?’
‘Security,’ said Schultz. ‘The censor always checks every word of my copy, so the stories are inevitably two or three days out of date when they appear, and after he has put his blue pencil through the most interesting paragraphs there isn’t much left worth reading.’
‘Right,’ said Armstrong. ‘From now on I’ll vet the stories. I’ll also have a word with the censor, so you won’t have any more of those problems in the future. Is that everything?’
‘No, Captain. My biggest problem comes when the electricity stays on all week.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Armstrong. ‘How can that be a problem?’
‘Because then I always run out of paper.’
‘What’s your current print run?’
‘One hundred, one hundred and twenty thousand copies a day at best.’
‘And Der Berliner?’
‘Somewhere around a quarter of a million copies.’ Schultz paused. ‘Every day.’
‘I’ll make sure you’re supplied with enough paper to print a quarter of a million copies every day. Give me to the end of the month.’
Schultz, normally a courteous man, didn’t even say thank you when Captain Armstrong left to return to his office. Despite the British officer’s self-confidence, he simply didn’t believe it was possible.
Once he was back behind his desk, Armstrong asked Sally to type up a list of all the items Schultz had requested. When she had completed the task he checked the list, then asked her to make a dozen copies and to organize a meeting of the full team. An hour later they all squeezed into his office.
Sally handed a copy of the list to each of them. Armstrong ran briefly through each item and ended by saying, ‘I want everything that’s on this list, and I want it pronto. When there’s a tick against every single item, you will all get three days’ leave. Until then you work every waking hour, including weekends. Do I make myself clear?’
A few of them nodded, but no one spoke.
Nine days later Charlotte arrived in Berlin, and Armstrong sent Benson to the station to pick her up.
‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked as her bags were put into the back of the jeep.
‘He had an important meeting that he couldn’t get out of, Mrs. Armstrong. He says he’ll join you later this evening.’
When Dick returned to the flat that night, he found that Charlotte had finished unpacking and had prepared dinner for him. As he walked through the door she threw her arms around him.
‘It’s wonderful to have you in Berlin, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be at the station to meet you.’ He released her and looked into her eyes. ‘I’m doing the work of six men. I hope you understand.’
‘Of course I do,’ said Charlotte. ‘I want to hear all about your new job over dinner.’
Dick hardly stopped talking from the moment he sat down until they left the unwashed dishes on the table and went to bed. For the first time since he had arrived in Berlin he was late into the office the following morning.
It took Captain Armstrong’s barrow boys nineteen days to locate every item on the list, and Dick another eight to requisition them, using a powerful mix of charm, bullying and bribery. When an unopened crate of six new Remington typewriters appeared in the office with no requisition order, he simply told Lieutenant Wakeham to turn a blind eye.
If ever Armstrong came up against an obstacle he simply mentioned the words ‘Colonel Oakshott’ and ‘Control Commission.’ This nearly always resulted in the reluctant official involved signing in triplicate for whatever was needed.
When it came to the electricity supply, Peter Wakeham reported that because of overloading, one of the four sectors in the city had to be taken off the grid for at least three hours in every twelve. The grid, he added, was officially under the command of an American captain called Max Sackville, who said he hadn’t the time to see him.
‘Leave him to me,’ said Armstrong.
But Dick quickly found out that Sackville was unmoved by charm, bullying or bribery, partly because the Americans seemed to have a surplus of everything and always assumed the ultimate authority was theirs. What he did discover was that the captain had a weakness, which he indulged every Saturday evening. It took several hours of listening to how Sackville won his purple heart at Anzio before Dick was invited to join his poker school.
For the next three weeks Dick made sure he lost around $50 every Saturday night which, under several different headings, he claimed back as expenses the following Monday morning. That way he ensured that the electricity supply in the British sector was never cut off between the hours of three and midnight, except on Saturdays, when no copies of Der Telegraf were being printed.
Arno Schultz’s list of requests was completed in twenty-six days, by which time Der Telegraf was producing 140,000 copies a night. Lieutenant Wakeham had been put in charge of distribution, and the paper never failed to be on the streets by the early hours of the morning. When he was informed by Dick of Der Telegraf’s latest circulation figures, Colonel Oakshott was delighted with the results his protégé was achieving, and agreed that the team should be granted three days’ leave.
No one was more delighted by this news than Charlotte. Since she had arrived in Berlin, Dick had rarely been home before midnight, and often left the house before she woke. But that Friday afternoon he turned up outside their apartment behind the wheel of someone else’s Mercedes, and once she had loaded up the car with battered cases, they set off for Lyon to spend a long weekend with her family.
It worried Charlotte that Dick seemed quite incapable of relaxing for more than a few minutes at a time, but she was grateful that there wasn’t a phone in the little house in Lyon. On the Saturday evening the whole family went to see David Niven in The Perfect Marriage. The next morning Dick started growing a moustache.
The moment Captain Armstrong returned to Berlin, he took the colonel’s advice and began building up useful contacts in each sector of the city — a task which was made easier when people learned he was in control of a newspaper which was read by a million people every day (his figures).
Almost all the Germans he came across assumed, by the way he conducted himself, that he had to be a general; everyone else was left in no doubt that even if he wasn’t, he had the backing of the top brass. He made sure certain staff officers were mentioned regularly in Der Telegraf, and after that they rarely queried his requests, however outrageous. He also took advantage of the endless source of publicity provided by the paper to promote himself, and as he was able to write his own copy, he quickly became a celebrity in a city of anonymous uniforms.
Three months after Armstrong met Arno Schultz for the first time, Der Telegraf was regularly coming out six days a week, and he was able to report to Colonel Oakshott that the circulation had passed 200,000 copies, and that at this rate it would not be long before they overtook Der Berliner. The colonel simply said, ‘You’re doing a first class job, Dick.’ He wasn’t quite sure what Armstrong was actually doing, but he had noticed that the young captain’s expenses had crept up to over £20 a week.